I am wondering, what do you think the average age to begin programming is. I''ve noticed programmers are getting younger and younger. How old are were you when you began programing? How did you get into it and learn? What percentage of people here work alone and make games as a hobby, compared to working in a team or working professionaly? Me? I am fourteen and I started programming about a year ago. I learnt C++ and DirectX from the internet, with no outside help. I used to think programmers were all people in their 40s who had spent years learing to do it, but over the last 6 months I have come to realise that it is more like 15 yr olds who want to make games and decided to do something about it.

quote:Original post by Ekim_Gram
Yes, but the real question is who sticks to it their whole life? Kids mostly start out programming so that they can make a game but after a while they realize that it''s easier said then done. It''s some psychological thing that I''ve seen in the past year of people giving up because it gets boring or they want to do something easier. I''ve seen stuff like this happen. Sometimes people find the whole logic thing total and utter crap when they learn it so they find programming harder. Then some try to go ahead of theirselves and try to learn everything all at once. They don''t realize how long it actually takes to become a programmer and make games. By the way, I''m 15.

LIES!!1!

Anyway, the age at which you start doesn''t matter, what matters is how long you''ve been doing it and how persistant you are.

i am 19 now and i started with 15

and to be true the first 2 years were a total waste

i learned 3x to 6x times as much within the last one and a half years

1. i started with the hl sdk and had no idea of objects classes and pointers and so on lol
2. after some time i finally decided to read a book on c/c++
after 3 months i have read the book and went back to the hl sdk
another 4 months and i got used to it
3. from there on i wrote tons of code for a mod we never released though

since i got bored with the SDK i decided to write an engine
so i ordered 2 book
the red book and one about graphic programming in theory
i have read both of them ( 700+1200 pages in english, my native language is german ...)

and now i am able to write engines with 3d sound via openal , 3d renderers, MFC applications, winsock networks and some other nifty things
and the clue is i learned this within 1 and a half year

ok i don t know everything perfectly but i know enough to get results and not just a huge useless code base

all you need is the motivation and when you burn out just play some games until these games get boring and you feel,damn i could code a better game....

blah blah

thats my history as a programmer.

I started out at age 8 or 9. I''m now 23. I used to do a LOT of BASIC programming. Up to 3 years ago. Then I made the switch to c++/opengl because I ran into some very frustrating problems with writing a 3D engine in BASIC It kept throwing me "divide by zero" errors and special casing those meant that some polygons didn''t get rendered. Then I decided it was time to make use of my TNT2 card and I got stuck in with NeHe''s OGL tut''s.

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i have wanted to do programming all my life. not just because i thought wow i wish i could make a game like that but because i could come up with the best ideas in the world. they are reaally unique and completely different to most games. however i have not actually made a game yet because i do not have the experience.

i always asked my dad to teach me how to program because he used to be a pro programmer. however all he did was give me a copy of dark basic and told me to use that. great idea pfft.

the first person to actually teach me anything with programming was my uncle from america who had a program called squeak. he went through the premade games in the program and we disected the code and that was great. i was proly round 12 then.

now i''m 15, i just started programming properly this year.dad bought me a book about games programming and a book about c++ which i still haven''t got through because its a bit confusing. that''s really funny because i''m actually really smart but what got me were the functions. now i get it all (pretty much) but i still haven''t gone through.

when i gave up temporarily i went over to the game programming book but i got confused with the win32 api and the handles. i now have gone back to the c++ book.

i had to make a qbasic game for school so i learned all about qbasic. i went on tutorials on the internet and now i''m the most knowlegable qbasic programmer in the class. this is what really jumped me into programming. i found out for myself what it was like to make a game.

the problem was that with qbasic is that it is the crappest, messiest language out there and you have to code and code and code. it''s slighhhhtly quicker and waaaay better with c++.

now i have started a teenager game programming team consisting of about 7 ppl all aged 16 or below. in fact there is a 12 and a 13 yr old so that''s just amazing.


anyway thats pretty much my life story in the way of programming.
i do ramble on quite alot don''t i (little understatement)

i''ll stop now before i bore evverryone away

if you cant do it your not worthy

Started at 14 with FORTRAN, COBOL, and BASIC. I''ll be 37 in August. I''ve been doing it as a job since I was 28. I''ve been coding longer than some people here have been alive!